Michael Cooke

Incomplete Thoughts

SFCCO performs Triangles

Incomplete Thoughts was born out of the news that the SFCCO would not have all the bassoons they normally have for the May, 2013 concert. I stopped the piece on which I was working, and came up with another: a contemporary passacaglia where the bass line was in one time and the other instruments in others. I was thinking to use either multiple conductors or metronomes with earpieces. Desiring inspiration, I looked though some of my incomplete compositions for a bass line, and found something useable in a draft of an opera from many years ago. The figure went through some modifications and was given a lazy lilt in 7/8. I wanted to layer fragments of music on top, which were inspired by scraps of music not yet finished and other incomplete utterances. As I felt the work should be written in a stream-of-conscious-manner, an interruption motif came into being as a way to switch thoughts. While I eventually decided that the original idea of multiple times might be hard to pull off, I came up with other ways to have multiple times. In the end, I hope to have created a thought-provoking work that is more than the collection of Incomplete Thoughts that began it.